


these are hard times for dreamers

by ZephyrEden



Series: Vanishing Point [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Dismemberment, Gen, Nightmares, Psychological Horror, but i can't promise this kind of violence won't be in the main fic, i honestly don't think it's that bad but i'm fairly desensitized to gore and violence in writing so, just tagging all that to be safe, which is why i'll keep them separate from the main fic, you can expect all the nightmare scenes to be like this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 06:32:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15479706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZephyrEden/pseuds/ZephyrEden
Summary: [companion piece to chapter 3]Riku should be glad he doesn't remember his nightmares.





	these are hard times for dreamers

The trees are watching.

Riku isn’t sure how he knows. He sees eyes on everything, but only out of his peripherals. The second he turns there’s only knots in the trees, gnarled bark where pupils used to be. The wind blows and the trees bend to follow him, grabbing after him as he runs through the woods.

The ringing in his ears is so loud it’s almost silent, a high-pitched siren squeal that’s sending his brain to near blankness. His head is pounding, pounding, _pounding_ , he swears it’s going to _pop_. He’s going to end up like a watermelon left out too long in the summer sun, his skin overripe and swelling to burst.

He trips on a root, one too high out of the ground to be natural. His chin hits the ground hard, his teeth knocking together and cutting through the inside of his lips. His mouth tastes like dirt, iron, and rotting foliage. He tries to spit it out but it’s stuck in his mouth like glue, thick and viscous and cementing his lips nearly shut.

He breathes harshly through his nose in rapid pants. He pushes himself up, sliding on the wet soil as it starts to suck him in. There’s shadows creeping in closer, he can feel them coming, almost humanoid except far too exaggerated to be. They’re tall, bodies stretched out like taffy so they tower like the trees, limbs too long so gnarled fingers drag on the ground, tilling the dirt as they come towards him.

He cups his hands like shovels, scrambling to claw his way out of the grave the earth was making for him. He finds roots webbed through the ground like a vein system for the forest and yanks on them until they give enough leeway from him to pull himself out. He stumbles to his feet and doesn’t realize he’s screaming until he feels the burning pain of his lips finally parting.

He can’t get away. There’s no where to go when the trees see everything, when the wind is whispering his whereabouts, when the moss is listening to his movements. The shadows are getting closer. They have yellow beads of glowing light that are too far apart to be eyes, the gaping grin of lined pearls too low on the abdomen to be a mouth.

They’re going to devour him.

They breath and the air turns to frostbite and he forgets what warmth has ever felt like. He can feel his skin crystalizing into ice, his tongue an icicle set heavy behind his rotting teeth. His movements are janky, jarring, like he’s a wind-up toy that’s running out of power, like he’s a series of cogs that have never been greased. He thinks he might have been made into a puppet, with a dozen abyssal hands pulling his strings in a hundred different directions.

There is no light. There is no moon, there are no stars; he’s starting to wonder if the sun was just some sick trick of his head. His head, the one that’s still pounding, the one that feels like he just needs to poke a hole in it to release some of the pressure. He doesn’t have anything to drill through his temples with, though.

He’s face down in the sopping soil, but this time it’s no fault of his own. He jerks his body around in an unnatural movement, each joint moving in independent stunted jolts like some malfunction in the hardwire of nature.

There are no eyes, only teeth. A hundred gleaming pearls and a throat that leads to nowhere. His skin chips and cracks like marble as the kiss of winter washes over his. He sees crooked fingers long enough to wrap around his arm several times snake up until it reaches his elbow. He blinks and feels his eyelid fall away. The mouth opens wider and shifts closer without moving, a gaping maw ready to consume.

He needs to get away.

He feels the familiar shape of the hatchet in his back, the handle stuck through the loop on his pants.

He needs to get away.

He struggles and kicks, his legs moving through the shadow like a cloud of smoke that wisps away and reforms. The grip on his arm tightens until his bones creak. His screams are mangled until they’re only a keening roar. He grabs the axe by the blade and doesn’t care about the sting from the sharpened edge biting into his skin like pliable clay. As soon as it’s within reach, he takes hold of the handle and reels it back.

He needs to get away.

He screams until it drowns out the siren in his ears. The blade is too dull to make the job easy. It’s burning, splitting anguish, the hand pulling the separated flesh further open until it’s a gushing wound. He doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.

_He needs to get away._

It’s nothing like his usual movements. Each swing is sloppy and savage and the shock from hacking his muscle from his bones is finally starting to set in. He winces one eye against the shards of skeletal shrapnel flying towards him.

It’s a sudden movement of give when he falls back into the soil that he notices the darkness still creeping up what’s left of the limb. It rushes over his skin like a wave, lapping at the edges of his sanity. The roots are moving, are tangling around him like he’s part of a spider web, and the damp earth opens up to welcome him home.

**Author's Note:**

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